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(1)Link vs (4)Cloud Strife (Legends Bracket) 2018
Ulti's Analysis Good. Freaking. Hell. We all knew Link would be a monster this year, but this is just insanity. As we all know, Cloud won the very first match he had with Link. Link has since spent 15 years beating the ever-loving shit out of the dude in revenge. It's been brutal. Here are all of the Link vs Cloud matches leading up to this one, in order: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1365-tournament-semifinal-link-vs-cloud-strife https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1780-tournament-final-link-vs-cloud-strife https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2129-tournament-of-champions-semifinal-link-vs-cloud-strife https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2566-battle-royale-final https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2925-tournament-final-link-cloud-l-block-snake https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3306-contest-final-link-crono-snake-cloud https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3856-contest-final-link-vs-cloud-strife https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4571-final-rounds-semifinal-link-vs-ganondorf-cloud-vs-sephiroth Their games have a similar history, too. Final Fantasy 7 won the very first match with Ocarina of Time, and has gotten its ass whipped ever since. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1659-division-final-final-fantasy-vii-vs-the-legend-of-zelda https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3508-contest-final-ffvii-zelda-lttp-zelda-oot-ffx https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3509-contest-bonus-final-fantasy-vii-vs-zelda-ocarina-of-time https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6181-best-game-ever-bonus-final-fantasy-vii-vs-zelda-ocarina-of There are two correlations here. One, Final Fantasy has not retained its strength. I'll get more into this when discussing the second match these two had, but Square been dropping the ball for almost two decades, and while Nintendo hasn't been perfect and in fact went through a long period between Wind Waker and Breath of the Wild where they were awful, Nintendo has been killing it since Breath of the Wild came out. That singular game changed everything with making the Zelda series open world, and when you add in Smash Ultimate the Nintendo dominance on this site is unmatched. We saw signs of this all throughout the contest (just look at all my writeups and search for the word "Smash"), and those signs all had to lead somewhere. They led to Link breaking 60 fucking percent on Cloud. That is an absurd number to get on someone who may still be our site's #2 character. Cloud actually breaking 40% in the rematch is a minor miracle. That's how dominant Link was in this contest, and had 1998 never happened in the years contest, Link in this one would be our most dominant non-rally champion ever. The other correlation here is that as GameFAQs has gotten more and more corporate and politically correct, it has gotten deader and deader and our vote totals have died. I want everyone to click on all of those poll links and just look at the vote totals. Now look at this one. It didn't even break 30,000 votes. Link himself had 30k by lunch time in most of those matches against Cloud. I have no interest in turning this into a politics discussion, but you have to be a company like Nike to survive going political in today's climate. GameFAQs has enough disadvantages as-is with intentionally staying obsolete as gaming went more and more streamlined and modernized. Going full leftist on top of that was just an idiotic move, and you see it in our vote totals. When you push enough people off of your site and constantly tell them they're free to leave, eventually they'll just leave. To the point, as vote totals have lowered, Zelda has retained strength. Cloud has not. It is that simple. But I want to focus on vote totals a bit. We don't even have to go back that far. Only five years ago, this match happened: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5253-character-battle-ix-division-1-final-link-vs-shepard-vs 122,000 votes. The finals that year got 150,000 votes. Three years ago, this match happened: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6175-best-game-ever-day-39-semifinal-smash-bros-melee-vs The final, featuring Zelda vs Undertale, got 157,000 votes. Now, our best matches get 30,000. That isn't just anti-rallying measures. That's us being on a site actively chasing people off. As for the match, it was interesting in the same way a car crash is interesting. Seeing Link be this much of a badass, even with lowered vote totals, was one hell of s site to see. He was actually over 62% at one point, which is just nuts. Cloud only won like 10 updates all match. This was just an embarrassment, and this is with Cloud having Smash Bros support. Can you even imagine how bad this would have been had he never gotten announced for Smash 4 or got cut from Ultimate? Does Link break 65% if that happens? Man. This was just brutal. Cloud would get to redeem himself in a way, but that doesn't stop this match from being completely and thoroughly embarrassing for him. Safer777's Analysis This is. The match that is tradition in these contests. We have seen this match so many times and only 1 time Cloud won. In the previous matches Link was scoring around 53% on average while Cloud was scoring around 47%. Now everyone in this match expecting Link to score high fifties while Cloud to score low forties. Personally I called before the match that Cloud wouldn't be able to break 40% and he would be lucky to even do that. Even the Crew didn't go such high for Link! And you see what happened. In the last hours of the match Cloud was beginning to gain percentage but he wasn't able to even reach 40%. We all knew that Link is strong but now nothing can beat him now. Not even rallies, nothing can I believe. There is Snake but we didn't know in this match how much weaker he would have gotten. So yeah. BOTW really boosted Link and Zelda. I believe Link is time to go finally. Have him face the champion as the bonus match and give no points for that. He will never lose again. And no other site cares for Gamefaqs to organize a rally anyways now. You can see that in the vote totals. All other characters can lose to other characters. All of them. Except Link. Fun! So there you go. Link won! I know the journey matters, not the destination but still. Tsunami's Analysis In my write-up of Sonic vs. Snake, I talked about the seeding for the Legends Bracket and what might have made more sense. Mario in particular seemed underseeded, I guess so he could be matched up with Sephiroth but Allen could've easily moved the divisions around. But seeing this as a semifinal match just begs the question, how far did Allen think FFVII had fallen? Link vs. Cloud is pretty much a finals tradition; we've seen it in 60% of character battles, including this one thanks to the double elimination format. And yes I'm counting the finale of the 2006 Battle Royale here. The outliers are 2002, where they were on opposite sides of the bracket but Cloud was infamously upset by Mario; 2003, where they met in the semifinals; 2005, which was kind of a no-win situation because the Tournament of Champions was to be Link, Cloud, Sephiroth, and a main bracket champion that was presumed to most likely be Mario (it was). Even with that only being the fourth character battle, Mario winning the main bracket (which he did) would assure that all three matches of the ToC were rematches from the first three years. Probably still should've gone with Link-Sephiroth and Cloud-main bracket champ (since the other favorite in the main bracket, Crono, had faced Link but not Cloud or Sephiroth), but either way...and 2013, when Draven turned the entire contest upside down. They also met in the semifinals in 2007, but since two characters advanced from each fourpack, they were able to both make the finals. But really, it was hardly even relevant, because this was Cloud's worst performance against Link by far. In direct 1v1s, Link had never even broken 54% against Cloud, and even in matches with multiple characters, the only time Link was able to get 1.5 times Cloud's vote total (equivalent of a 60-40 in 1v1) was in Day 3 of the 2006 Battle Royale. Which I guess is proof that even Link is not completely immune to LFF since it suggests that he previously not only needed Sephiroth in the match to pull it off but also for Mario and Samus to both be absent. In a way, it's kind of disappointing that the top characters were held out of the main bracket. It's fun to see a good old-fashioned blowout every once in awhile, the big dogs going to town on the fodder every once in awhile. It's kind of like the difference between men's basketball and women's basketball. In the men's tournament, the raw records are usually a fairly good match to the seeding lines, because the mid-majors are usually going to get dinged in non-conference when they play the top teams. The women's tournament will frequently have teams with double-digit losses up around the 4-5 matchups while the 12-13 seeds they beat to get there had only 2 or 3 losses, because the top teams play each other in the regular season all the time, which by correlation means that there aren't any "big dogs" to keep the mid-majors from running up gaudy records. I suspect this is done to try to drum up interest in the regular season since the women's game is far more wanting for viewers, but let's be honest; if you're interested enough in the women's game to be enticed by the marquee matchups, you'd probably watch the marquee teams face overmatched teams, too. For those who aren't paying attention until the tournament, however, it's just confusing, because March Madness was built on the upsets. When a team like Stephen F. Austin makes it to the men's tournament with a record of 30-3 and gets a 12-seed, we jump on that potential upset. In the women's bracket, almost everything looks like a potential upset, and it usually isn't. Watching titans go at it is fun, but to truly appreciate greatness, you have to see it overpower weaklings from time to time, too. Otherwise you just have to trust the experts that yes, this is greatness, just not quite as great as some other greatness. Link was just on another level this contest. We saw it with Zelda in the main bracket, but it was clearly evident that it was the series boost too, as opposed to just that strange boost that a lot of female characters seemed to have this contest.